Girl, Xtreme

Connie Cohen

RICK HARTFORD

Even Sick Chick Connie Cohen of Bristol hasn't gotten used to the nitro noise. Here, she watches a nitro drag racer take off last summer at the track in Englishtown, N.J. Her race was cancelled because of poor weather and because her Harley had mechanical problems.

Even Sick Chick Connie Cohen of Bristol hasn't gotten used to the nitro noise. Here, she watches a nitro drag racer take off last summer at the track in Englishtown, N.J. Her race was cancelled because of poor weather and because her Harley had mechanical problems. (RICK HARTFORD)

RICK HARTFORDThe Hartford Courant

The Sick Chick is walking in the pit at Raceway Park in Englishtown, N.J., surrounded by a Mad Max spectacle of black leather and motorcycles.

This is an outdoor temple of speed, and the air is drenched with the incense of gasoline fumes and burning rubber. In the distance a nitro bike screams its iron lungs out in a qualifying run.

Hells Angels in black leather and jeans and chains share space peacefully with moms and dads in polo jerseys and shorts, their children trailing behind.

Two big bikers in black leather jackets struggle through the crowd carrying a huge cooler by its handles as if they were pallbearers at a biker funeral. It's so heavy they have to set it down and change sides before struggling somberly onward.

Sick Chick's real name is Connie Cohen. She is 5 feet tall with curly blond hair. She loves Harleys and speed and talks with a twang she describes as a "little bit of Detroit mixed in with a little Colorado." She grew up in Motor City and was the first woman to graduate, in 1980, from Denver Automotive and Diesel College.

She makes her way to the starting line to check out the track and watches a "burn out," which each bike does before the start of a race: The racer locks the front brake and cranks the engine to full throttle, a huge furious beast marking its territory. The exercise is a practical one. Spinning the rear tire gets it hot enough to stick to the ground during takeoff. Cohen watches, disappearing momentarily in a cloud of white smoke.

She is one of the fastest female nitro racers in the world. She picked up her nickname after crashing her bike in a race in Daytona going 145 mph.

When the bike went down she glanced over and saw she was still beating the other biker while she was sliding on her rear end. She got up, dusted herself off, and walked off the track as her bike burned. Didn't break a nail.

Some Sick Chick, somebody said.

She liked the sound of it. "I like the thrill of it. It's not the feeling of going fast because you can't tell that you're going fast," she said. "It's when you take off. That's when you feel the G forces. In seven seconds you're going 188 miles an hour.

"You know, you only have seven seconds. It goes by so fast, so fast. You don't even have time to blink. Sometimes you don't breathe."

As a teenager in Detroit she and her girlfriend used to sneak her black 1968 Chevy Biscayne 327 - with the shift on the column "three on the tree" - out of the driveway, push it down the street, and gun it to Woodward Avenue to drag-race in the middle of the night.

She started racing bikes on a whim. She went to a drag race with her husband, Marc, and fell in love. She sold her Corvette and bought a Harley dragster.

It was a hobby at first, and it didn't matter to her if she won anything. But now other women are beginning to look up to her, and winning has become very important.

Today, Cohen's bike sits outside the trailer. There is tension in the air, and nobody seems to be in a hurry to go near it. Marc, the crew chief and chief mechanic, sits alone in the doorway of the bike trailer. He wears a pair of thick black shades and smokes a cigarette. He is as opaque as his sunglasses.

The rest of the crew includes "wrench," or mechanic, Pete Marrocco of Bristol, and support crew Ingrid Mattie and Tammie Chessic, both of Plantsville.

Killing time, Marrocco talks about the bike.

"We're basically not supposed to be able to do this," Marrocco says about powering the 114-cubic inch bike with nitromethane fuel. The sport of motorcycle drag-racing using rocket fuel, he says simply, is "dangerous as hell."

The sign of a good run, he says, is when the spark plugs have been melted beyond recognition.

People are afraid of this particular engine, Marrocco says, gesturing to the yellow bike squatting a few feet away.

Once, before a race in Ohio the head bolts blew off when Marc started it, striking him in his arm and chest with shrapnel. That's why Connie wears a bullet-proof vest now when she rides.

"You might as well play Russian roulette with three bullets in the gun," says Chessic.

The crew is quiet for a minute. Marrocco breaks the mood.

"Everybody's blown up at least once," he says cheerfully.

Marc comes by. He and Connie go into the trailer to talk. They come out and tell the crew they will not race today. Marc heard something clicking in the rear end of the bike when he was backing it out of the trailer. He knows there is something wrong with it and they can't risk a disaster on the track. By the time he'd pulled it apart and fixed it, the event would be over. Then it starts to rain, so Connie ends up selling "It Takes No Balls to Ride" T-shirts before they pack it in.

The Cohens, who both work, have sunk half their retirement income into racing. Getting sponsors has been difficult. Mark wants to get out of Harley nitro racing and put everything into racing their NHRA Suzuki pro stock bike. The pro stock bikes, which race in the National Hot Rod Association, have huge corporate sponsorships and command big prize money and national television coverage.

"He just thinks I'm crazy because I want to ride that bike," she says about the Harley.

He says, "For what? There's nothing there, and you can kill yourself."